Mose McCormack will put you under the jail tonight on The Santa Fe Opry!

McCormack, who has been picking and singing and occasionally releasing albums in New Mexico music since the 1970s, will be playing on my show, starting a little bit after 10 pm Friday (Mountain Time) on KSFR, 101. FM in Northern New Mexico and streaming live HERE.

Here's a profile of Mose I wrote for No Depression back in the '90s. And below is Mose performing one of his tunes:

Close your eyes and imagine you’re lost on a foggy night on some uncharted back street off the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or near the port of Amsterdam, where the sailors all meet. From some dangerous little dive you hear music: after-hours blues, off-kilter torch songs, Gypsy jazz, hot Weimar Republic cabaret, “punk noir,” strange tangos, and dark, soulful ballads. But before you can go in, you wake up.

Don’t worry. You can find that kind of alluring music on a new collection called Anthology by Mojo JuJu& The Snake Oil Merchants.

In case you’re not familiar with Mr. and Mrs. JuJu’s baby girl, she’s an Australian from Melbourne who has been a solo act for a few years. But Off Label Records, my favorite crazy German punk/alt-blues/garage/slop country/jug-band record company in recent years, compiled this collection of her work with her old band and released it last month to expose this music to a wider audience — and, I suppose, to show us what we’ve missed.

The music here falls somewhere between that of Cab Calloway and Gogol Bordello. I’m also reminded of the Eastern European-influenced Firewater. “Fisherman’s Daughter” starts off with a horn section that sounds like it might have come from a ’90s ska-punk group. And if anyone claims that Tom Waits isn’t a major influence, they’re either lying or deaf. Try to listen to Mojo’s banjo-led, horn-accented “Sacred Heart of Mary” without being tempted to sing along in your best phlegm-heavy Waits voice.

And elsewhere, like on “Transient Being,” you might be reminded of the late Amy Winehouse. That is, if Winehouse had been prone to using accordion and trombone in her songs. In one interview, Mojo said she gets her inspiration from “scary antique stores.”

Sounds reasonable.

Some of the best tunes here are the ones that sound like they could have been theatrical pieces. “Scat Song” would have fit in on the soundtrack of Boardwalk Empire (maybe in a scene set in Chalky White’s nightclub). “God and the Devil” is a little morality drama in which a woman hears a pitch from the Prince of Darkness and asks, “Well, I looked that devil right square in the eye and said, ‘Do I look stupid to you?’ ”

One of the darkest, most striking songs on Anthology is the near-seven-minute “But I Do.” It’s slow and menacing. Mojo sings of pain in her heart, the piano plays sinister little one-finger trills that sound like Morse code, and the drummer seems to be pounding to drive away demons.

The song that sounds most autobiographical here is “My Home,” an intense tango in which Mojo sings:

And the color of my skin and the color of my eyes has meant that even in my homeland I have been mistaken for a stranger in a foreign countryBut it’s my home. This is my home.

She sounds angry and proud. It’s powerful.

Mojo Juju, without her Snake Oil Merchants, is about to release her latest solo album, Seeing Red/Feeling Blue, next month. That should be worth checking out.

Also recommended:

* Worthy by Bettye LaVette. I normally don’t quote James Taylor much (if at all), but listening to this album made me flash on an old line by sweet baby James: “A churning urn of burning funk.”

To be sure, it’s slow-burning funk, and one of my few problems with the album is that there should have been a few more faster numbers. But like LaVette’s best work since the turn of the century, the soul runs deep. Every song on this album is a raw emotional statement — though that’s also true of just about all the songs on just about all of her albums.

Quick biographical note: LaVette has been in the music biz since the 1960s. But as a result of bad breaks, bad business decisions, and the fickle nature of the entertainment industry, she never quite made it beyond the status of cult favorite.

That changed around 10 years ago, when she met up with producer Joe Henry, who helped LaVette make I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, an album that not only was worthy (yes, I used that word) of her talents, but also had some commercial appeal, at least for hip adults.

She’s made some fine albums since then — one of my favorites is The Scene of the Crime, which Patterson Hood, of the Drive-By Truckers, produced in 2007 and which had a nice rock ’n’ roll edge.

When it comes down to it, Henry is a perfect fit for LaVette. And Worthy is a sweet reunion.

The album contains a song from each of the cosmic trinity of 1960s rock: “Unbelievable,” an obscurity from Bob Dylan (from the critically disdained 1990 album Under the Red Sky); a Beatles throwaway, “Wait” (from Rubber Soul); and the Rolling Stones’ “Complicated,” which was on their underrated album Between the Buttons.

But LaVette isn’t aiming for some empty-headed ’60s nostalgia here. Remarkably, she makes you all but forget the original versions by these exalted masters. I didn’t even recognize “Complicated” until about halfway through. “Unbelievable,” which kicks off the album, is the toughest and, yes, funkiest thing on the record. And LaVette brings out more emotional depth in “Wait” than the Fab Moptops ever did.

Other gems on Worthy are the slow, bluesy “Just Between You and Me and the Wall You’re a Fool” (written by James Brown, but not that James Brown); the stunning “Undamned,” which begins, “Sometimes the things we believe turn out to be nothing but a scam/I’m just trying to get my world undamned”; and “Stop,” a minor-key Joe Henry tune in which LaVette gets defiant. “Don’t tell me to stop,” she sings.

Here is a classic American tune that perhaps you first heard in an old cartoon.

Like this one:

Or maybe you remember it from Ken Burn's Civil War series.

Or maybe ever so often it just bounces around in your subconscious, just part of your American musical DNA.

It's called "Kingdom Coming" or sometimes "Year of Jubilo." And it was written in 1862, during the Civil War, by a popular songwriter of the day named Henry C, Work (1832-1884).

Warning: The song was written for a minstrel show. And we all know about minstrel shows. Indeed, this song does contain a racist epithet: "darkies" and it's meant to be sung in minstrel show dialect.

But before we condemn Henry C. Work, consider his life. Born a Connecticut yankee, he was a devout abolitionist and supporter of the Union in the war, It ran in the family. His parents’ house was used as a stop in the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves fleeing to Canada.

Despite the minstrel show conventions found here, the lyrics mostly ridicule the "massa," who has been frightened away from his own plantation by Union gunships.

It's a song of liberation in which the slaves celebrate, locking the cruel overseer in the smokehouse and helping themselves to the massa's liquor cabinet.

“The whip is lost, the handcuffs broken, but the master will have his pay ..."

I couldn't find any Youtubes of the song from the 1860s, but here's an old version by National Barn Dance radio star Chubby Parker:

Will Rogers sang it the 1932 film Too Busy to Work in which Rogers, playing a drifter named "Jubilo," who is reunited with his long-lost daughter,

But my favorite version still is that of The Holy Modal Rounders, who recorded two versions of it through the years, both titled "Year of Jubilo." They joyously screw with the lyrics. In the Rounders' versions you don’t see Lincoln’s gunships, you see Lincoln himself with “a piece of paper in his hand,” presumably the Emancipation Proclamation. “Abe Lincoln come, ha ha/Jeff Davis go, ho ho,” they sing.)

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

They wanna hear some American music, American musicThey wanna hear that sound right from the U.S.A. ...The whole world digs that sound from the U.S.A.
The Blasters sang it.

I believe it.

That settles it.

And so I'm going to indulge in a little American exceptionalism, musically speaking, and present a little showcase how different styles of the American music we love deeply in out hearts have been reinterpreted by pickers and singers from all over the globe.

Some of the music below might make you laugh at first. That's OK. After all, it's Wacky Wednesday. But after a chuckle or two, listen to these songs. There are some fine musicians here and their art is a testament to the glory of American music (not to mention the kinship of musicians throughout the globe and the strands of human culture that unite creative people everywhere.).

Obviously, American music has been influenced by all sorts of sounds that originated in Europe, Africa, Mexico, pre-statehood Hawaii etc. But hard-working American musicians turned it all into something new. And around the world, those who heard the call soaked it in and added their own sounds and made it new again.

In fact, the artists I like best out of these are the ones who take our roots music and add elements of their own culture. One of the best examples of this is a Romanian blues band called Nightlosers. Years ago I reviewed their albumPlum Brandy Blues. And I still love it.

We sing about stuff that matters to young people, in general, and social [issues]. [For example], the high school diploma, here, is unbelievably difficult, so, we wrote about that. We wrote about fathers forcing their young daughters to marry older men, about our generation that is frustrated and lost and don’t know wot to do with their lives, about less separating of boys and girls, and about how we need more attention and freedom.

Below, from the group's Bandcamp page is their 2013 EP M is for Mazhott. (And if you like these amazing songs, fork over a couple of bucks and buy it! I did.)

And of course, there is Japanese bluegrass. The Ozaki Brothers, Yasushi and Hisashi, are bluegrass pioneers in the Land of the Rising Son, who as pre-teens in World War II, had to secretly listen to the American folk music they love because the government had banned it, according to WAMU's Bluegrass Countrywebsite,

Here's a 2009 video of the brothers singing "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb."

And let's close out with some Argentine rockabilly by a band called Coyotes!

God bless America!

(Hat tip to Tripp Jennings, who inadvertently inspired this with an unrelated Tweet last week,)

Thursday, March 19, 2015

So in celebration of the changing of the season, here are three of my favorite songs about spring.

First, Gene Autry, performing the title song -- or close to it-- of one of his classic singing cowboy movies, Springtime in the Rockies, which was released in 1937.

Five years later, Betty Grable made a movie with the same title.

But Autry didn't write this song. A Mormon history blog called Keepapitchinin tells the tale:

The ballad became a hit single for Gene Autry, and later for country singer Hank Snow. The nostalgic words set to their simple melody suggest that this is an old folk song, its words polished by countless anonymous singers. But it is a 20th century creation, its lyrics written by a Mormon girl, Mary Hale Woolsey, born in Springville, Utah, in 1899.Mary attended Provo High School, then Brigham Young University where she served as a class officer and wrote for student publications. With a keen ear for the spoken word, Mary wrote several operettas performed by local theater and church groups and found a ready market for her radio plays.She successfully collaborated with professional musicians. “Springtime in the Rockies” was published in 1929 with music written by Robert Sauer and was followed by other songs in the sentimental western genre – “When the Wild, Wild Roses Bloom,” “Colorado Skies,” and “On the Trails of Timpanogas” were all popular for a time.

So there is our history lesson for the day. Here are two other spring favorites:

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Sometimes at night when I go to bed and close my eyes, these songs play in my head. Taunting me.

Some of the lyrics were inspirational to me. For instance I always aspired to live up to the Yogi Bear credo: "He will sleep to noon but before it's dark, he'll have every picnic basket that's in Jellystone Park."

Somehow I fell short of that. Oh well, on with the show, cartoon pals.

There were a couple of Rocky & Bullwinkle themes, (This one had the best sound quality of what was available on YouTube

Friday, March 13, 2015

Here's my playlist below:OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens
Back in the Saddle by Gene Autry
Lost in the Ozone by Commander Cody & The Lost Planet Airmen
Rainy Day Woman by Waylon Jennings
Georgia on a Fast Train by Billy Joe Shaver

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Back in 2011, when Spotify was new to these United States, I embarked upon a little "exercise in self-indulgence" and created a Spotify playlist of songs "that were parodied, stolen, alluded to, mentioned in passing in or somehow have a spiritual connection" with tunes on my 1981 smash hit album Picnic Time For Potatoheads.

Posting about that Spotify list on this very blog, I quipped, "If the album actually ever had been successful, here are some of the lawsuits I would have faced."

I thought about that list and the blog post tonight while reading a rant by my friend John Egenes posted on Facebook concerning a lawsuit over music copyrights.

I recalled my blog post, so I looked it up and re-read the thing. (And I fixed a four-year-old typo I hadn't noticed before.)

The entry about "My True Story" by The Jive Five said:

This song itself didn't directly inspire "The Green Weenie," but it's part of the great Doo-Wop Collective Consciousness that did. (I was disappointed that the Frank Zappa catalogue is not on Spotify. My first choice would have been a Ruben & The Jets tune in honor of the late Jimmy Carl Black, who played on "The Green Weenie.")

It occurred to me that in more recent times, I had seen Zappa on Spotify.

So what the hell, I updated it with my favorite Ruben song "Later That Night."

It's the last one on the playlist

I'm keeping the Jive Five tune on there just because it's such a great song.

And here is the song Ruben & The Jets inspired (drums by the late, great Jimmy Carl Black!)

Faith and begorrah and Erin go braugh, it's only five days until St. Patrick's Day!

So here is a look at one of my favorite Irish outlaw songs, the tale of a "brave young highwayman" named Willie Brennan.

Here is one version of the lyrics:

'Tis of a brave young highwayman this story we will tell, His name was Willie Brennan and in Ireland he did dwell. 'Twas on the Kilworth Mountains he commenced his wild career, And many a wealthy nobleman before him shook with fear.Refrain:And it's Brennan on the moor, Brennan on the moor, Bold, brave and undaunted was young Brennan on the moor.One day upon the highway, as Willie he went down, He met the mayor of Cashel, a mile outside of town. The mayor, he knew his features, and he said, "Young man," said he, "Your name is Willie Brennan, you must come along with me."(Refrain)

Now Brennan's wife had gone to town provisions for to buy, And when she saw her Willie she commenced to weep and cry. Said, "Hand to me that ten-penny," as soon as Willie spoke, She handed him a blunderbuss from underneath her cloak(Refrain)

Now with his loaded blunderbuss—the truth I will unfold— He made the mayor to tremble, and he robbed him of his gold. One hundred pounds was offered for his apprehension there, So he, with horse and saddle, to the mountains did repair,Did young Brennan on the moor, Brennan on the moor, Bold, brave and undaunted was young Brennan on the moor.(Refrain)Now Brennan being an outlaw upon the mountains high, With cavalry and infantry to take him they did try. He laughed at them with scorn until at last 'twas said By a false-hearted woman he was cruelly betrayed,(Refrain)

Although others, notably Burl Ives, had recorded it before, it's Tommy Maken & The Clancy Brothers' version from the early 1960s that introduced me to the song.

"This song was widely sung in the Victorian era ... William Brennan really did exist, and was one of the most famous Irish criminals of the period. It is not easy to get authoritative information about him , mainly because legend quickly obscured fact, and even his date of death is not known for sure; 1804 is most cited, but there are other references to 1809, and even 1812, and while most sources claim that he was taken by authorities and formally executed, there is also a tradition that he was killed by one of his potential victims in a highway robbery which went wrong."

The Penguin book notes that like most outlaw ballads, this song turns Willie Brennan into a Robin Hood-like character, "And many a wealthy nobleman before him shook with fear ..."

Basically it was the gangsta rap of its day.

In his cool website ... Just Another Song, folklorist Jürgen Kloss, in writing about "Brennan on the Moor" notes that 18th Century lawyer John Edward Walsh in 1747 claimed that the children's "integrity and sense of right and wrong was confounded, by proposing the actions of lawless felons as the objects of interest and imitation."

So, for the love of God, keep this vile song away from the children!

It should be noted that in some versions, Willie's own mother denounces him for his outlaw ways: "Oh, would to God that Willie had within his cradle died.'" (In some, it's his father who makes this declaration.)

And in some versions, "modern" ones Kloss says, the ghost of Willie still rides: "They see him with his blunderbuss, all in the midnight chill."

A young Bob Dylan dug The Clancys' take on "Brennan on the Moor.

In the liner notes of Dylan;s first Bootleg Series, John Bauldie wrote: "Dylan heard them sing the song in New York and loved it immediately. He told film director Derek Bailey in 1984: `I'd never heard those kind of songs before...all the legendary people they used to sing about - Brennan on the Moor or Roddy Macaulay...I would think of Brennan on the Moor the same way as I would think of Jesse James or something. You know, I wrote some of my own songs to some of the melodies that I heard them do...' "

And a website called Bob Dylan's Musical Roots quotes Liam Clancy: "I met the young Dylan on 4th St. in the Village one morning as I was rushing to rehearsal. 'Hey Liam, hey man. I wrote a song to the tune of `Brennan on the Moor' last night. Wanta hear it man?, only 15 verses man, wanna hear it'."

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

I'm very thankful that nobody was recording me that fateful night about 15 years ago when I basically cleared out an after-hours party at a downtown Albuquerque bar with my karaoke rendition of "You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma."

So I have some sympathy for the poor folks who basically are the butts of the joke in all these videos.

That being said, I think these are hilarious.

Enjoy

When I first heard this song sung by Dolly Parton on a car radio in the 70s, I was so awestruck, I almost drove my car off the road. When I heard this, I wanted to drive my car at a high speed toward the singer.

I wouldn't want to hear much more of Amy, but she's got personality

This guy isn't as cute or funny as Amy, but that's o.k. He sings even worse.

I have to admit, I don't think I'd sing very well either if I was suspended over a tank full of frogs and water snakes. This apparently is some kind of weird game show in Thailand.

Thursday, March 05, 2015

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New MexicanMarch 6, 2015In some alternative universe, some parallel world somewhere over some rainbow, the return of Sleater-Kinney in 2015 with an album as riveting as No Cities to Love is considered to be as big as the return of the Beatles was in 1975. (This is a separate reality, remember.)

Of course, it’s not quite like that here in the material world.

Truth is, most folks don’t value rock ’n’ roll as much as many of us used to. Perhaps Sleater really was the greatest band alive when it went on “hiatus” nearly a decade ago.

But outside of alt-rock or punk rock circles, it wasn’t and, sadly, still isn’t universally known. I’ve got a feeling that Carrie Brownstein is more famous for her co-starring role on the comedy series Portlandia than she is for her role with Sleater-Kinney.

So, for those not familiar with this important band, here’s the lowdown: This Pacific Northwest group is a trio with Brownstein and Corin Tucker on vocals and guitar and Janet Weiss on drums. Sleater-Kinney’s self-titled debut album was released in 1995, at the tail end of the Riot Grrrl scene, but S-K quickly transcended the generic girl-punk sound.

Vox recently described the group as a “left-leaning, feminism-preaching” band. Maybe that’s true, but the beauty of Sleater-Kinney is that it rarely, if ever, sounded like it was preaching. Any politics in the band’s songs were subtle and personal — no sloganeering or polemics. The group grew and actually intensified through the years, never losing its original frantic energy. It split up after its 2005 album, The Woods.

We rock ’n’ roll die-hards tend to view comebacks with jaundiced, jaded eyes, despite some good ones returning in recent years — Mission of Burma, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the Afghan Whigs, for example, came back with strong records. No Cities to Love is also one of the good ones: It’s an unmitigated joy.

I consider Wild Flag, the 2011 album by the group with the same name, which includes two-thirds of Sleater — Brownstein and Weiss — (as well as singer/guitarist Mary Timony, who fronted the ’90s indie band Helium) to be a precursor of No Cities to Love. Shortly before then, Tucker made a solo record she described as “middle-aged-mom” music. (As I said back then, despite my senior citizenship, I’m still not ready for “middle-aged-mom” stuff.) But in 2012, she came back with a harder edge with Kill My Blues. With that and Wild Flag, I should have known that reviving Sleater-Kinney wasn’t an impossible dream.

No Cities opens with “Price Tag” — with what first appears as a lazy, almost bluesy groove. But seconds later, the drums kick in, the beat speeds up, and Tucker starts singing urgently: “The bell goes off/The buzzer coughs/The traffic starts to buzz,” and all of a sudden we’re in the middle of the rat race, punching a timecard at a crappy job, stocking shelves and worrying. Tucker sings as if she’s being crushed by the pressure — and the music is even more anxious than the lyrics.

Similarly, the stark, muscular “Gimme Love” is about someone who was born “too small, too weak, too weird” and who is “numb from the wicked this life imparts,” while “Surface Envy” employs images of drowning, though it’s a hopeful song. In the last verse, Tucker sings, “I’m breaking the surface, tasting the air/Reaching for things I never could before.”

But all is not so heavy on this album. In fact, “A New Wave,” sung by Brownstein, who also plays a distorted, rubber-toned guitar, reminds me of The B52s. (The official video for this tune features a cartoon version of the band playing for characters from Bob’s Burgers.)

In the final chorus of “Bury Our Friends,” Tucker and Brownstein sing, “We speak in circles, we dance in code/Untame and hungry, on fire in the cold/ Exhume our idols, bury our friends/We’re wild and weary but we won’t give in.”

Also recommended:* Ballsierby The Grannies. America needs this music. The country needs musicians like these, who aren’t afraid to dress up like nightmarish parodies of old ladies and play crazy, aggressive, funny, profane, politically incorrect, and ridiculous music.

The Grannies don’t care if they make it on network TV or get invited to the White House — or anywhere else where there is polite company. They don’t care that they’ll never play the Super Bowl — though anyone who has survived one of their shows knows the Super Bowl would be much cooler if they did.

This album is punk rock — punk rock as the good Lord intended it to sound. It’s 11 snot-slingin’, beer-spittin’, breakneck, gut-bustin’ punk rock songs with titles like “Wade in Bloody Water,” “Outta My Skull,” and “Hillbilly With Knife Skills,” And there’s a crunching cover of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right.”

Grannies in action, San Marcos, Texas. 2014

Then there are a couple of remixes of Grannies songs, my favorite being a total re-imagining of one of my Grannies faves, “The Corner of Fuck and You” A producer named Ben Addison used flutes, soft horns and an ultra-cheesy beat to turn the song into something that sounds like it's from some bad British swingin’ ‘60s romantic comedy

The album is produced by Seattle titan Jack Endino, who’s been behind the knobs on some of your finer grunge and punk records.

Blog Bonuses
First off, here's a live show broadcast on NPR a couple of weeks agoCLICK HERE

Pat Hare, born Auburn Hare in Cherry Valley, Arkansas, played guitar with some of the great classic bluesmen -- James Cotton, Little Junior Parker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, the late great Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon, Ike Turner and Muddy Waters. (He played on Muddy's Live at Newport, 1960 album.)

And his playing was unforgettable.

Nick Tosches, in his book Where Dead Voices Gather, described Hare's style as "black-magic electric-guitar conjurings through overamplified distortion [that] foreshadowed those of Hendrix ..." Cub Koda, in the Allmusic Guide, called Hare's playing as "highly distorted guitar played with a ton of aggression and just barely suppressed violence ..."

Though he never got famous, Hare undoubtedly would be a darling of the blues scholars and rabid early rock 'n' roll zealots because of his musicianship.

Unfortunately, he's better known for something that had nothing to do with his guitar playing.

On Dec. 15, 1963, after a day of drinking, Hare at the time was living in Minneapolis with a married woman named Aggie Winje, who, Hare told a friend, was thinking of moving back with her husband. After spending sometime fighting with Aggie, Hare told a neighbor "That woman is going to make me kill her." Another neighbor called police after hearing shots fired. Two officers responded. And one of them was shot to death by Hare. Aggie had been shot also.

The other officer pumped some lead into Hare, but he survived. Aggie hung on for nearly a month, but died Jan. 22, 1964.

According to music journalist James "The Hound" Marshall in his detailed account on an excellent site called The Houndblog: "When questioned, Hare remembered only that he was drunk and claimed to have no recollection of shooting anyone."

But to add the ultimate twist to this squalid little tale, nearly a decade before, at Sun Studios in Memphis, Hare recorded a jolly little ditty called "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby."

In May of '54, Sam Phillips decided to record Pat Hare under his own name. James Cotton was scheduled to play harmonica on the session but the two got into a fist fight that day, and Cotton disappeared. Instead, Hare is backed up by Israel Franklin on bass and Billy Love on piano on the two tunes. The first is a monstrous reading of Dr. Clayton's "Cheatin' & Lyin' Blues," re-titled on the tape box "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby," it was and still is, one of the most foreboding and ominous recordings in the entire blues canon ... Phillips chose not to release Hare's disc which would not be heard until it slipped out on a bootleg on the Redita label in 1976, and later appeared on Charley Records' Sun Blues Box in the eighties.

Hare was convicted of murdering his baby and the cop who came to help. He died of lung cancer in prison in 1980.

He's still a resident of Rock 'n' Roll Hell, where he's currently in a band with these guys ...

Wednesday, March 04, 2015

For this Wacky Wednesday, here's a tribute to my favorite waterfowl, the Duck.

According to Wikipedia (which is always right about everything):

Duck is the common name for a large number of species in the Anatidae family of birds, which also includes swans and geese. The ducks are divided among several subfamilies in the Anatidae family; they do not represent a monophyletic group (the group of all descendants of a single common ancestral species) but a form taxon, since swans and geese are not considered ducks. Ducks are mostly aquatic birds, mostly smaller than the swans and geese, and may be found in both fresh water and sea water.Ducks are sometimes confused with several types of unrelated water birds with similar forms, such as loons or divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots.

So, sorry all you loons, divers, grebes, gallinules, and coots. This ain't for you. These songs are for the ducks.

This next one by the beautiful Carolina Cotton, makes me wish I was a damn duck!

Eddie "The Chief Clearwater" walks the duck

Nobody has really done musical justice to the duck as much as this disco classic from Rick Dees & His Cast of Idiots

OK, the next one is stretching it. It's not really about a duck. It's not really really about oysters either. It's an old traditional American square dance mutated before your very ears by the late great Malcom McLaren. It's from his masterpiece album Duck Rock. And if I were a duck, I'd love this song.

Finally, just for weirdness' sake, here's a strange little band called Purple Duck I found while messing around on the Free Music Archive (The original video I had here disappeared, but here's another one)

Big Enchilada Souvenirs

Just So Ya Know ...

This site is a personal publication independent of my professional capacity at the Santa Fe New Mexican.The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Santa Fe New Mexican or santafenewmexican.com (Same goes for KSFR. Don't blame them for anything weird I might post here.)